1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for integrating a surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter and a transceiver, more particularly to the design and concept of a component stack architecture.
2. Description of Related Art
As the wireless communication technology is developed rapidly, various mobile devices and wireless network products are introduced unceasingly to the market. In the wireless communication technology, a signal is received, demodulated, decoded and computed and then the signal is coded, modulated and transmitted. In general, the level of difficulty will be higher and the circuit operation will be less stable, if a high-frequency signal is converted into a digital signal. Therefore, the design of a wireless communication system includes a radio frequency (RF), an intermediate frequency (IF) and a signal operating base-band frequency (BB). In a detail circuit design, a surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter is usually added to a transceiver to filter the noise in a high-frequency signal. With the trend of the wireless communication products being light, thin, short and compact, the quantity and area of internal components of these products encounter a very big challenge. Therefore, the development of component integration has become an indispensable part of electronic products and technologies. Since the integration technology between high-frequency components and base-band components is very different due to the materials and characteristics of the components, and thus giving us plenty of room for further improvements.
Please refer to FIG. 1 for the schematic view of the structure of a device for integrating a SAW filter and a transceiver according to a prior art. Under the conditions of not affecting the performance of a SAW filter 13, most SAW filters 13 adopt a ceramic substrate package and keep their surfaces not in contact with each other to assure the performance of the SAW filter 13 due to the properties of the piezoelectric material in the SAW filter 13. However, such design still has the problem of being unable to reduce the package size of a SAW filter 13. Therefore, the integration between a SAW filter 13 and a transceiver 12 is accomplished by a printed circuit board 11. The transceiver 12 and the SAW filter 13 are built on the printed circuit board 11 for filtering the noise of a radio frequency (RF) signal.
In view of the description above, the foregoing prior-art SAW filer and transceiver are inconvenient and still have drawbacks in the actual practice, and thus requiring further improvements. The drawbacks are listed below:
1. The area of the SAW filter 13 is too large;
2. The SAW filter 13 is installed by itself and cannot be integrated into other components effectively;
3. There exists a problem of losing a signal easier when the signal is transmitted by the printed circuit board; and
4. Poor quality of a printed circuit board may cause a signal distortion or a system failure.
In view of the aforementioned drawbacks, the inventor of the present invention based on years of experience of the related field to conduct extensive researches and practice the theory, and finally invented a feasible design to effectively overcome the aforementioned drawbacks.